Film Reviews by Alphaville

You want to know what’s wrong with arthouse cinema? Try to watch this so-called ‘film’ – a dreadful 250 minute sequence of static, stagey, score-less, tell-don’t-show scenes. You know the kind – longueur after longueur of silences mingled with people yapping away while nothing at all happens on screen. In short, the antithesis of cinema.

Supposedly a Filipino re-imagining of Crime and Punishment, it’s a crime against cinema and a punishment to sit through. On the DVD cover the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calls it ‘gripping’ and the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Robey calls it ‘spellbinding’. Some critics should have their licences revoked. Somebody tell them that film is a visual medium. We must stop them now before they encourage more of this deplorable drivel.

There’s a plane crash. Air traffic controller feels guilty, husband of dead family feels grief. As the trailer has it. ‘two lives will collide’. If only. It’s based on a true story but the by-the-numbers plot arc and emotional drama make for predictable cinema. In fact you don’t need to watch the film at all. The trailer will tell you everything and save you having to sit through it.

This insufferable Sundance-winning high school talkfest stars the supremely irritating Miles Teller. Described as ‘an effortless charmer’, he’ll have you pressing the off button in less than two minutes. If you don’t believe that, check him out on the trailer.

Creepy IT expert takes a fancy to his boss’s (Pierce Brosnan’s) teenage daughter. Pierce gives him the brush-off. Mistake. Cue an engrossing thriller that’s also a commentary on the dependency of modern society on computers and hackable personable data: financial records, social media, medical records, even a hi-tech house and car. Can Pierce fight back as his life is pulled apart by the IT guy?

The film was unfairly panned by critics but it’s a terrific premise whose pace never lets up. It has no pretensions to being other than a good tense thriller, but in that it succeeds admirably. John Moore directs with visual flair and Timothy Williams contributes a thumping score. Well worth a look.

You’ve probably given up on M. Night Shyamalan by now, but you might want to give him another shot with this. James McAvoy has 23 multiple personalities, kidnaps three teenage girls and keeps them in a locked room. You’d think the girls would take one of several opportunities to beat him over the head with one implement or another, especially in his 9yo boy guise, but we have to skip over this gaping plot hole. After all, it isn’t Room.

There’s very little variety in what happens on screen except to explore McAvoy’s various personalities, padded out with a subplot concerning his psychiatrist and pointless flashbacks to our main heroine’s childhood. However, there’s a nice sense of foreboding as we learn that there may be a 24th personality called the Beast. This builds to a silly but fun climax and a great coda. This is a flawed film, but at least it’s a Night film you want to keep watching.

Castaway Paul Dano finds a dead body (Dan Radcliffe) washed ashore. Using his farting body as a jet ski, he escapes to the shore of Humboldt Redwoods. That’s not the talking body’s sole usefulness in this surreal comedy, which amazingly manages to maintain the conceit for 94 minutes. It’s a challenge for the Daniels (writer/directors Scheinert and Kwan) to keep such a two-hander interesting for so long, but the film really works.

In the excellent DVD extras (making of, behind the scenes, interviews, film commentary etc.) they explain how they wanted to make ‘a celebration of friendship and collaboration’ as well as ‘a beautiful and heartfelt movie about a farting corpse’. Incredibly, they succeed on all counts. It’s a film in which you never know what’s going to happen next, which is unfortunately rarer than ever these days. Watch and wonder

Josh Hartnett stars in a Korean film and chooses the wrong one. This is one of those thriller that has no thrills. The plot goes nowhere as director Tran Anh Hang gets bogged down in one longueur after another. Worth dipping into for an eccentric score (including Radiohead) and the charismatic screen presence of Lee Byung Hun. At his moody best as a Hong Kong gangster, he effortlessly steals every scene he’s in with barely any dialogue.

This travesty of a film takes all the tropes of a thriller and turns them into clichés. Bank heist, sassy girl gang leader, suave sadistic adversary, confusing rapid-edit fights, Morgan Freeman as a corrupt senator (who literally phones in his performance from a different country). Tick.

It’s not long before all that pointing of guns at each other starts to grate. You’ll not care a jot about any of it. Typical dialogue: ‘You’re really starting to piss me off’ and ‘I’m fed up playing your games’. People still write this sort of stuff?

Writer/director Matt Ross doesn’t put a foot wrong in this absorbing tale of a man bringing up his children in the backwoods as personable and literate. Every barb directed at the establishment and consumerist society hits home, from governmental failings to obesity and processed food. But the kids are also socially inept, and the film doesn’t shrink from portraying that.

It’s a wonderful film to watch, never flagging for a second and constantly entertaining and surprising. With the picturesque sheen of an escapist hippy fantasy, it both tugs at the heart and makes you think, which is no mean feat. The performances, including those of the six children, are flawless and there are some great dialogue exchanges. A sure-fire winner.

If you like Mama Mia, for reasons best kept to yourself, you might even like this. Who knows? Who cares? The pre-titles dance sequence is well choreographed but to the most dire non-song you’ve ever heard. It’s downhill from thereon, with increasingly amateur hoofing to muzak of which even an elevator would be ashamed. At least Mama Mia had some ABBA tunes to ruin.

There’s even some bad jazz. The hero tries to explain his love of jazz to our heroine, which only succeeds in confirming a jazz-hater’s worst suspicions about it. Our heroine, meanwhile, is into the film business, hence the film’s Oscars (Hollywood loves to stroke itself).

One star for competent camerawork and production values. West Side Story it ain’t. Cabaret it ain’t.

What sounds like a fun concept becomes bland in the realisation. This is a by-the-numbers retelling of P&P with a few zombies shoe-horned in to occasionally attack the principal characters. It needs to be anchored in Austen reality, but the cod-Austen dialogue never rings true. We never care about these cardboard characters so the zombie attacks soon bore.

Charles Dance strikes the right note as the straight-faced Mr. Bennett, while Matt Smith makes a fair stab at a humorous Mr Collins, but Lily James as Lizzy and especially Sam Riley as Darcy never convince. One of those films that seems to have been more fun to make than to watch.

A 2009 Korean spaghetti western set in the Manchurian desert by talented director Kim Jee-Woon. It has its OTT cringe moments thanks to a Jackie-Chan-type character (the ‘weird’), but the ‘good’ is suitably heroic and the ‘bad’ is brilliant, thanks to Lee Byung-Hun’s usual charismatic screen presence.

Above all, the set pieces, as in all Kim films, are glorious. He revels in the power of visual cinema, playing with the image in an almost Godardian way. The opening train heist is flamboyantly filmed with swooping fly-cams and travelling shots. Even better: a sweeping 12 minute chase sequence across the desert that is part of a brilliant last half-hour paying homage to Sergio Leone.

This Kim Ji-Woon film from 2005 was one of his early actioners and all the elements are in place. Beautiful cinematography and an engaging score that is part epic and part ironic keeps the viewer glued to the screen even between the set-pieces. Lead Lee Byung-Hun makes a charismatic Alain Delon lookalike who carries the movie. Just to wallow in the image as he drives around Seoul to a mesmerising score makes you realise the magic that only cinema can produce.

The film is let down by an uneven pace and a climax that stretches incredulity, but the set pieces are explosive. This is not Kim’s best, but it’s still better than most so-called action thrillers.

Called Kilo Two Bravo in the US, this is a riveting war movie about British paras trapped in a minefield in the 2006 Afghan War, with casualties mounting. It’s hard to criticise when it’s so well staged and based on a true incident, with profits from the cinema release going to charity. Nevertheless, judged purely as a piece of film, it’s certainly not a feel-good night’s entertainment.

It’s filmed with documentary-style naturalism with unknown actors, naturalistic drama and no score. The first half-hour is full of male banter and military jargon that’s hard to follow. The attempt at authenticity is laudable but it’s more of a filmed document than a great film in its own right. However, it certainly keeps you glued to the screen.

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are stuck on the spaceship Avalon, the only passengers to have awoken early from suspended animation. For the first half-hour this is one of the most evocative portrayals of man alone in space since Kubrick’s 2001. This is despite the fact that we know Lawrence is going to appear because her picture’s on the poster. Note: make sure to avoid the awful tell-all trailer.

The remainder of the film focusses on the relationship between the two. It would be a corny love story were it not for the exotic location and the deftness of its handling. The set design and visuals are stunning throughout. Unfortunately the last act degenerates predictably into the standard explosive nonsense.

Like 2001, Passengers proves that you don’t need Aliens, Predators and other monsters to make an engrossing space movie. It looks amazing and it deals with moral and existential issues that, for most of its run-time, add a much-needed grown-up feel to current Hollywood output.